“Faith Without Certainty”

       May 19, 2024        

Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Any decent parent knows that when their children go through that phase of being afraid of monsters under the bed that it is their job to comfort their children by assuring them that there are no monsters under the bed. I used to tell my daughter that all of the monsters are in Congress, but we never let them come to our house. You can’t start too young to let your kids know that even though there is not a monster under their bed, there are monsters in the world. 

 

But what about when the family dog dies? How many parents have tried to comfort their children by telling them, that their dog has gone to a better place? That he is happier now? Should we really do that? 

Of course, if you live in North Dakota you might try telling them, “Well, Governor Kristy Noem was driving by and you know how she can be . . . . I’m sorry, I just can’t get that story out of my head. 

 

Childhood is full of anxiety. Children are small and vulnerable, growing up in a world of giants upon whom they are entirely dependent. So, childhood is marked by imaginary monsters, their dreams are filled with chasing dreams, falling dreams, and fears of isolation or abandonment. Still, I prefer honesty. I think we can even look to Disney’s Lion King on this one, I don’t know of any child who was upset by Mufasa explaining the circle of life to Simba. 

Very honestly and factually, he explains that we are all connected. They eat the antelope but when lions die, their bodies become the grass that the antelopes eat. They are in a beautiful connection. It is sad that all living things eventually die but the molecules of their body return to the universe where, for all of time, they will reappear in many things, grass and trees, grasshoppers and birds. I wouldn’t start out with Nietzsche, kids don’t need to hear that death is what gives life meaning . . . my undergrad students couldn’t get Nietzsche so I wouldn’t expect a toddler to appreciate him but honesty, in my estimation, is better than delusion. Such things deserve a lot of delicate compassion, but I just don’t think that false comfort is a good choice, not for children and certainly not for adults.

 

Movies often become our modern myths. At one time, when almost everyone in the western world had a pretty comprehensive education in biblical stories, that common awareness made it possible for us to reference Noah, David and Goliath, Jezebel, or Elijah, and we could be confident that everyone knew the story. Now we can reference The Lion King, The Matrix, maybe Gone With the Wind, and the Wizard of Oz, with confidence that just about everyone knows the story, even though they are all fictional. 

 

I have often said that progressive religious people have given up false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty. That sounds simple but I know that it is not easy. We don’t want to live like anxiety riddled children, we crave the security that comes from certainty. Religion has far too often offered absolutes, the ten commandments, dietary laws, rigid sexual boundaries, definitions of marriage, family, and charity. 

We’ve all known people who at least talked like they took their fundamental religious training at face value and never allowed themselves to consciously question it. That, I submit, causes a lot of problems when people take myths too seriously. We watch the Lion King and enjoy the story and the music, but we know that Lions don’t really talk. Sadly, however, a lot of religious people will read the story of Adam and Eve and actually believe that snakes talk, or that they at least could talk in the way back when. 

 

Several years ago, when the large denominational church where I was the senior pastor was going through some remodeling, an artist was hired to paint a mural on the wall of the nursery. I wasn’t personally involved in the details of any of that, but I did stick my head in the door during the painting to see how it was going. 

The artist had chosen, I assume with the approval of the education committee, to do a mural of the story of Noah’s Ark. I was frozen in my tracks, even though I could remember there being a toy ark with lots of animals that went inside of it as one of the toys in the church nursery where I was a child. The story of the great flood is a horrifying story. God killed billions of people and even billions more animals, out of regret for having ever made us, but decided to save a few in a boat to start the world over again.

 

We are so comfortable with this story that we will paint a mural with smiling happy people and animals like that are taking a Sunday afternoon boat ride on the lake . . . we don’t depict the floating dead bodies all around because, at our root, conscious or not, we know it isn’t a true story. We know that it didn’t happen. So, you’re painting a mural in a kid’s room in a church, do something Biblical.

I might of gone with something like “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight,” sort of thing. But they went for God’s mass genocide of the human race and all the animals of the earth.

 

And if you grew up in one of those churches, you undoubtably knew all of the words to the song about it:

“The Lord said to Noah, there’s gonna be a floody, floody.” Remember? The refrain repeated, “Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory,” but the verses happily recount the building of the “arky arky” and the animals coming by “twosy twosys” . . . one wonders why children don’t have more nightmares about this. It is a horrible story about a monstrous, murdering God, and yet the song ends:

“The sun came out and dried up the landy landy

And everything was fine and dandy dandy.” 

 

Forgive me but, we’re all outraged about Kristy Noem shooting her dog but we teach our children to sing a happy song about God killing 99.9999% of the people in the world? I hope that you are not offended if I ask, “What the actual hell?”

I trust that you can see, we wouldn’t tolerate this narrative for a moment around our children unless we had already realized that it just wasn’t true. In the ancient world, it was a horrifying and not a subtly threatening story, but since it is pure fiction, we can do with it whatever we want. No one really takes it seriously. . . . it’s just that, unless you are a Unitarian, you have probably never heard a minister be honest about it public.

 

A decent preacher will use stories of these grand divine events, dividing the Red Sea, the stories of Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, even the miraculous feeding and raising of the dead stories in the prophets, to teach modern moral lessons. 

Not many will add the footnote, reminding the congregation that these are ancient myths and not matters of historical fact, but, I hope that most people reach that conclusion even if it isn’t blatantly pointed out to them.

 

But we don’t live in an age of myths and fables . . . we have more than our share of embarrassing conspiracy theories, but we live in an age of science which has trained us to be more “fact literal” about the world. Whereas people in the ancient world did not tell and retell these ancient myths as literal history, unfortunately, modern people tend to do that exactly. We don’t tend to read ancient myths for their moral lessons, at least some religious people want to put them on the same shelf in the library as their history and biology text books . . . as we see being played out in state legislatures in red states even this spring. 

 

Science gives us a different kind of faith. I have an amateur interest in physics. I regret that I didn’t get more formal training in physics, but I love to try to catch up with new discoveries when someone is kind enough to break it down into layman’s terms. A friend recently sent me a link to an article about the possible discovery of a tiny particle that is called “the glue ball.” At the subatomic level, the universe is believed to be made up of only 12 particles of matter that are held together by four forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak force and the strong force. The reason why there are particle colliders around the world is so that physicists can try to break atoms apart and find these particles and observe these forces at work. The Beijing Spectrometer III is especially good at locating the meson particle which is made of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. It is in observing these particles that disappear almost as soon as they are observed is where physicists think they may have found this glue ball that helps to hold uncharged particles together in the nucleus of an atom. 

 

I can read about this research with a kind of childlike wonder but, isn’t this another kind of faith? I don’t understand it. I have no idea how particle colliders work, nor would I know what a charm quark or meson was if a bunch of them suddenly stood up in my soup. I have a tiny bit of knowledge, just enough to give me tremendous respect for the theorists and physics researchers who investigate these things. And I am willing to give them a lot of room to declare that most of the universe is made up of dark matter even though no one has ever seen dark matter and no one knows what it is, we just know that there must be a lot of dark matter because without its gravitational pull, the universe’s accelerating expansion wouldn’t make sense. 

 

I have seen evidence of gravity and electromagnetism but I take it on faith that the weak force and the strong force operate at a subatomic level . . . I can’t see them, but I accept that atoms do stick together and if they are making that happen, I am grateful.

Science attempts to learn what is true about the universe but science is morally neutral. The myths and fables of religion were never intended to tell us about physics or history, but they were intended to teach morality, to teach us how to live, how to choose to show compassion, to create the kind of civilization in which both love and justice might flourish. 

I think that Karen Armstrong is the most comprehensive and almost impossibly well informed religious scholar alive today. I highly recommend all of her books to you but just know, it is a bit like trying to drink from a firehose. But she said about religious myths: The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.

 

As a progressive preacher, I keep trying to liberate religious people from taking ancient myths literally to save them from the moral pitfalls that are inevitable when people try to think that way. The constant wars between the extremists of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is often the result of bad theology. And though we don’t hear much about it in the west, there have been horrible bloody conflicts between Hindus and Buddhists. You can look up the Black July Massacres as one example. Religion, at its best, helps us to be better people so that we can create a better society. Religion that is mired in superstition and magical thinking actually causes a lot of the problems we face in the modern world.

 

Pope John Paul II once wrote to, the director of the Vatican Observatory, that “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

 

It has always been a mistake to think that science replaces faith or that faith must resist scientific inquiry. In the best of all possible worlds, science and faith help to guide one another. The critical thinking skills and devotion to reality inherent in science can help religion to clean house, examine our myths and free us from the grand moral failures that have cursed the human race. 

Similarly, the devotion to compassion and justice that is inherent in sincere spirituality can help to keep science from reducing life to a kind of nihilism. 

 

I have used this illustration before but please allow me to repeat it once again:

I had to leave it behind when I moved to my new home in Florida but this Ficus tree stood in my living room for nearly 40 years. I moved it outside every summer and managed to wrestle it back inside every fall, year after year. On the right you see me pictured with my lovely Korean daughter whom I adopted 35 years ago. Both she and the Ficus tree are made of the same 12 particles of matter, held together by the same four forces of nature. Their atomic composition is actually very similar, they even weigh about the same. They are both made up of atoms formed billions of years ago in exploding stars. But that is where the similarity ends. 

 

I cared for, fed, and raised them both, but there is a huge difference in how I feel about them. Physics can describe them atomically, but physics cannot measure the love I feel for my daughter. Science can describe what is, what exists, what is the substance of a thing, but spirituality brings meaning to the equation. I don’t exist in a universe of atoms, my life is lived in relationships, connection to people, nature, that is defined by awe, wonder, love, and hope. 

 

I am a pastor who does not believe in a literal heaven or hell, I don’t believe in souls, angels, and I don’t believe in a super-natural person who lives in the clouds who sometimes grants what we pray for but generally doesn’t. But I am deeply religious, not in a matter of beliefs, rituals, creeds, or sacraments, but in a passion for justice and a deep love and hope for both humanity and nature. 

 

I deeply regret that conservative Islam and conservative Judaism teaches children in Israel and Gaza that God wants them to kill each other. Just as I hate that Christians and other world religions allow their superstitions to justify misogyny, homophobia, racism, and the exclusivism that makes us value ourselves and allows us to justify indifference towards the suffering of others. 

 

I’ll close with one more quote from Karen Armstrong, this one is my favorite:

If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. ”

 

Let’s use our critical thinking to interrogate our myths as we strive to become better people. I realize that traditional religious folks may find it a lot easier to give up on Old Testament myths than using the same interrogation skills on the Jesus narratives in the New Testament. Still, that may be the more important work for us as we grow past the religion we learned as children. So, I’ll be talking about the limitations on what we really know about Jesus in my talk that will be posted on June the second. 

“USA at War with Russia and Iran”

           May 5, 2024               Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

President John Kennedy once referenced what he called “an ancient Chinese curse,” in a speech delivered in 1966, saying that the Chinese often cursed their enemies saying, “May you live in interesting times.” The proverb is neither Chinese nor is it ancient, but it is ironically true, isn’t it? Cursed or not, we are living in interesting times. With hot wars in Ukraine and Palestine, an almost inevitable invasion of Taiwan by China, a horrifying presidential election which could bring an end to democracy and free elections as fascism seems to be gaining an ever stronger footing in the Republican party. Technological advances in artificial intelligence and renewable energy hold both promise and dread as huge cultural changes are now on the near horizon. We didn’t choose to be born into such a volatile world but here we are. We are living in a time when moral leadership is needed more than ever. 

 

As former Attorney General, Eric Holder, recently prophetically said, “There is no cavalry coming. No miracle solution. No saviors. In the end, we, the American people - not any of our institutions - have to save our democracy by voting in defense of that democracy this fall. We are the cavalry. The responsibility is ours.” 

 

In these interesting times, institutions we once trusted, seem now to be compromised beyond redemption. One need only pay attention to the past two years of the evolution of the Supreme Court into a partisan dumpster fire to realize there is no cavalry about to ride over the hill to save democracy. The Supreme Court has sacrificed their moral credibility in service to a moronic Clementine Caligula in exchange for enthroning 16^th century Roman Catholic misogyny into law. It is difficult to believe that the highest court in the world’s oldest democracy could have fallen into such corruption, incompetence, and freedom hating ideology. But when you elect someone like Donald Trump as president, you can’t expect him to appoint great legal minds to the bench. 

I like the Turkish proverb that says, “When a clown moves into a palace, the clown doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” In 2016 we put a lying, misogynist, con artist in the white house and now, even though he is gone, our justice system and our legislative branch are still reeling with the circus he created. I shudder to think how much more damage he could do if we screw up and give him another bite of the apple.

 

Thankfully he was out of office when Russia invaded the Ukraine two years ago, because now the world is standing on the precipice of a nuclear war, more so, perhaps, than even the early cold war days when I and my elementary school classmates were taught to hide under our desks in case of a nuclear war. 

 

Most of us initially feared that Ukraine would fall to the Russian armies in a matter of weeks if not days, but their fierce and courageous defense of their homeland has, over the passage of time, expanded the membership of NATO and made most western nations willing to inch ever closer to nuclear war by increasing the types and amounts of military aid to Ukraine. 

 

You may remember that we initially would not give them aircraft or long-range missiles because we didn’t want to escalate the war. And Putin even mentioned the possibility of using nuclear weapons to discourage strategic support of Ukraine. Repeated Russian war crimes and huge death tolls among Ukrainian civilians has emboldened the USA and NATO to step up our support of Ukraine, accepting the increased risk of what desperate moves Putin might take if he feels trapped. 

 

The media, which can rarely walk and chew gum at the same time, virtually forgot about Ukraine last fall after the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel. 

This attack that included the most barbaric elements of rape, torture, and murder of babies caught the conservative government of Israel off guard. The failure of Netanyahu’s government has caused him to try to look bold and decisive by responding to Hamas in what looks like a genocidal war against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Six months later, this shocking attack on a civilian population has provoked outrage around the world, seen most recently boiling over on American college campuses. 

 

Two things can be true at once, especially in such complicated times as these. I am glad that university students are now increasingly aware of world events, and they are willing to take drastic measures to express their views. I am sorry, however, that they seem to be so opposed to Netanyahu’s tactics that they have forgotten what Hamas did to start this conflict and they are allowing Anti-Semitic fringe elements to shape their protests in a way that threatens the safety of Jewish students on their own campuses, many of whom actually sympathize with their protests against Netanyahu’s excesses. You can support Israel and not support Netanyahu. You can advocate for Palestinians without threatening to start another genocide against the Jews. 

 

Students across America have been heard to repeat the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” without a sincere understanding of what that chant really means. Look, there is no way to polish this turd. This is the Jordan River and this is the Mediterranean Sea, the east and west boundaries of Israel. This chant is an antisemitic threat from Palestine that they will literally push the Jews into the sea. Attempts at insisting that it does not mean what it clearly means shouldn’t fool anyone. 

 

I am a reluctant supporter of Israel. The theft of Palestinian territory to create a Jewish homeland at the end of World War II was stupid, illegal, and based on little more than British and American Sunday School geopolitics that wanted to give Jews the Holy Land as they romantically imagined that God had given it to them three thousand years ago. 

 

In what started out as a casual conversation in a local coffee shop, got heated when an older man insisted to me that the Jews own that land because God gave it to them. Checking off another coffee shop from Vero Beach’s options where I am no longer welcome, I pointed out that it is no great wonder that the Jews wrote a book in which they say that God gave them the land but that would hardly stand up in a real estate title claim, especially since the Muslims have written a book that says that God gave that land to them. 

 

Honestly, the book of Exodus describes God as being a violent, pathological land thief. How could anyone defend that absurd claim in the 21^st century? . . . However, I could take you to a nearby coffee shop and introduce you to some people who do defend it . . . but I’ll have to wait in the car. 

I hate that I have to go back a full century to find a member of the Supreme Court that I am willing to quote in a sermon but I want to tip my hat to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes  who said:

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I will give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

 

I realize that the news in these interesting times is draining, it is stressful, and, admittedly, it is complicated. I’m afraid that many of our college students are taking a far too simplistic view of the Palestinian crisis but you can’t really fault them when senior members of the Republican led house are daily repeating Russian propaganda, endangering the world and destroying American credibility. 

I expect more of our university students but I am at a loss for what to say about how ignorant, unAmerican, and dangerously misinformed these Republican members of congress are. 

 

Some have even repeated, on the floor of Congress, Russian misinformation like insisting that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine was using our aid money to buy two yachts. This is obviously Russian slander but who would have believed than people who are holding elected seats in the Congress could be dumb enough to believe it?  I think someone has been skipping important briefings.

 

As many of you surely know by now, I have not been a great fan of President Joe Biden but when it comes to managing foreign affairs, we have a lot of reasons to stand up and applaud his steady hand on the wheel in the midst of complicated events to which there is no easy answer and all of the simple answers are more dangerous than the more measured approach he has taken. Everyone in the world, save only a small group of radicals in Israel, is mad about how the response to the Hamas terror attack in October has been handled but I just have not heard many people offer a workable solution to removing Hamas from power in Palestine and if you believe that Hamas should be allowed to continue to exist in Gaza then I submit that you have not studied the events closely enough. 

 

Long time listeners will recall the many times that I have said that I am so opposed to war that I am already against the next war. Honestly, that has not been much of an over statement. We never should have invaded Afghanistan, there were better ways to respond to the 9-11 attack on the US. We had little to no reason to invade Iraq and, in fact, we took away the one military check that Iran had, allowing them to become a regional exporter of terrorism and possibly a nuclear threat. That war was ignorant on every meaningful level. 

 

One of my professors at Harvard was fond of saying that if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. The United States has been so invested in military power that we have often acted like all we had was a hammer and I have advocated for more than 40 years that we invest more in diplomacy and less in military might. I am not a pacifist but I always kind of wanted to be one. 

 

Still, I often look at military action in much the same way that I look at a parent spanking a child. Many parents argue that spanking is the only thing that works on their kids, but I tend to think that use of violence against kids is not parenting but evidence of having failed at parenting. If beating your kids is how you hope to teach them good behavior, I think that you have already missed the point.

 

War is almost always a sign of a failure or a gross neglect of diplomacy. There were a thousand things that Israel should have been doing to improve the lot of Palestinians before the October terrorist attack, but once Hamas had done what they did, a military response was necessary. 

 

I think that the west has been disingenuous about the security of Ukraine and that we had sent a lot of the wrong signals to Russia about NATO, but once Russian armies poured over the border into Ukraine, a military response was necessary. I hate it, but without a time machine, there are not many options.

 

Hamas can only do what they do because of funding and supplies from Iran. Iran would love to attack Israel and the United States directly for both historical and ideological reasons but they know that they can’t win in that confrontation so they resort to proxies; of which, Hamas is only one. 

 

The United States now finds itself engaged in two undeclared wars. It may sound horrible to say it, but we are using Israel as a proxy to fight Iran and we are using Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia. The world cannot afford for us to ignore the danger posed by both Iran and Russia and, selfishly, I am glad that we have found ways to do it without deploying American troops even though we must not look lightly on the sacrifices made by combatants made on both sides of these wars.

 

When I was in Thailand last winter, the beaches were full of draft age Russians who were avoiding be sent to fight in Ukraine. Many Russians who have died in the war were prisoners who Putin sends into battle, il-equipped, and sometimes even unarmed, to smoke out the positions of Ukrainian forces and to deplete their ammunition. Putin is heartless even though people like the Georgia congresswoman, Marjory Taylor Greene keeps insisting that Putin is “not that bad.” I don’t know how many listeners that I have in Georgia but I beg you, do something to get this woman out of Congress.

 

There was a horrifying block of aid by Moscow Marj and other Republican right wingers in the Congress until mid-April. House Speaker, Mike Johnson, who had previously voted against aid to Ukraine, was preventing any future aid from even being voted on until Ukraine was nearly out of ammunition and was being forced to plan a retreat. Somehow he experienced a sudden conversion. 

I’ll side with MSNBC news host, Joe Scarborough, who says of deathbed conversions, “I’ll take it.” Johnson was playing a very dangerous political game with much needed aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. I have been horrified by his willingness to put world stability at risk so that a few Republican right wingers could feel like they were “owning the libs,” but it looks like some rational thought has penetrated his lust for power. A lot of damage has been done to our reputation and the coalition of western nations was in danger of falling apart but, as I said, better late than never, so I’ll take it.

 

We have been concerned that if Russia is successful in annexing Ukraine that Putin would not stop there. But I think that the longer we keep Ukraine supplied to stay in the fight, the less able Russia will be able to invade a vacant shopping mall.

 

May I remind you that we won the Cold War, not by deploying troops and fighting but buy building up our military resources in a way that provoked the Soviet Union to do the same until they ran themselves broke and the Soviet Union fell apart without our ever firing a shot.

 

In the same way, Putin thought he would take Ukraine quickly. He was not supplied for a sustained war and the more he runs his assets down, the less capable he will be to threaten Poland or other former Soviet states. Bloomberg estimates that Russia has spent more than half of its capital on this war in the past two years. Possibly half of their armored vehicles have been destroyed. 

 

What is more, the BBC estimates that more than 50,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in this war. Uncounted thousands have been seriously injured. These losses come straight out of the demographic sector, those 20 and 30 year olds, who would have shaped Russia future. 

 

Their future scientists, inventors, business, and government leaders are now buried in Ukraine. I hate this for the Russian people but the world will be safer if this war leaves Russia incapable to menacing its neighbors again. Think of the roles played by Germany and Japan in the lead up to WWII and look what happened when those devastated nations moved past their war era madness and started to build a technological and advanced society rooted in education and business. 

 

Less than a century ago, Germany, Japan, and Italy were what Russia, Iran, and North Korea are to us today. Could we imagine a world in which Russia, Iran, and North Korea could become some of our best friends? Is it too much to hope for? 

 

Please don’t become jaded by the current state of affairs. We have been in darker places in modern memory, and I believe that with the right heart, the right moral vision, a new and better world is waiting to be born. But remember, you are the cavalry that has to make it happen. 

“Hyperbole, Hysteria, and Hypocrisy”

 “Hyperbole, Hysteria, and Hypocrisy”       

 

   April 21, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray  

 

Click here to see the video

 

 

 

Before Muhammad, before Jesus, and even before Buddha, there was the Greek storyteller, Aesop, who has had the singular literary success of having his stories repeated, especially to children, for 25 centuries. 

 

People of my generation all know the story about the boy who cried “wolf.” Aesop tells us about a young man who was tasked with watching over the village’s herd of sheep during the day, a singularly boring job, and so, to create some excitement, the boy cried out to the villagers that a wolf was coming to attack the sheep. Of course, he got a big reaction but when there was no wolf in sight, he was scolded. But later boredom set in again, and he again cried “wolf,” and as this happened over and over, eventually, the villagers ignored him so that when a wolf actually did come to kill the sheep, none of the villagers responded when the boy called for help, so that many of their sheep were lost. 

 

Hyperbole, exaggeration, can be useful literarily tools as long as such inflation is not overused. We know that Julia Robert’s smile is not really a mile wide and that none of you have every been hungry enough to eat a horse, but we know what is meant by this kind of hyperbole. But it is best when used sparingly. 

In this, the 15^th presidential election of my memory, I am aware that politicians have been crying “wolf” way too often. Of course, the 1800 election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was trumpeted as the most important election of a lifetime but even back then, such hyperbole was not reserved for presidential elections only. 

A hundred years ago, a Tennessee newspaper, the Greeneville Democrat-Sun, described their coming vote as being “the most important election in the history of the county will  … when Greene County will be called on to vote $200,000 for the purpose of resurfacing the roads.” 

 

So, I am not sure how to go about recovering the language of imperative after it has been so abused for hundreds of years, but folks, we are six months away from a presidential election that could, in very fact, be the last free and open democratic election in the United States. Our nation is in such grave peril, it is incomprehensible that it even needs to be said. But, evidently, it does.

 

In previous years, I considered myself to be a fairly astute political observer, but I have to confess that now I do not understand the world that I live in. I have always been a political liberal, for which I would credit my childhood in Christian Sunday School. Clearly, I was hearing something that my peers in rural Kentucky did not. The Bible I grew up reading was decisively anti-war, it taught compassion and charity towards the poor and the sick, it told me to welcome immigrants, to oppose racism, to be sexually circumspect, and to always tell the truth. 

Inexplicably, I grew up in the same part of the world with the same religious indoctrination as Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, with markedly different outcomes. 

 

So, naturally, I thought the election contest between Ronald Regan and Jimmy Carter would be the most important of my life. Then I thought the contest between the war criminal, George W. Bush and the war protestor, John Kerry was the most important race in my lifetime. 

 

I didn’t think that the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was all that important because there was no way that more than a dozen people in America could possibly be tricked into voting for Donald Trump. I and a whole lot of other people were wrong about that one. I watched the election returns that year from Belize where I was scuba diving with my daughter. My Asian daughter cried and for the first time in our lives, she referenced her race saying, “I don’t want to be brown in Trump’s America.” We were stunned.

 

I consoled my daughter then saying that Trump would only be in office for a month or so. He was such an obvious con man, a sexual predator, a liar, and criminal that he would have to be impeached almost immediately. I was wrong about a lot of things in politics that year and I have felt like a stranger in America ever since.

 

I even said to many friends in 2020 that I was relieved that since Trump was voted out of office that we could safely turn on the national news and never hear his name mentioned again. Trump made me ashamed to be American, and I was traveling to speak in Great Britain frequently in those years and there was no shortage of people who wanted to remind me of why I should be ashamed of what my country had become. But, when Biden took office, I felt like there would never be a reason to mention Trump in the news again unless someone happened to kill him in whatever prison he was in following the insurrection. My apologies to any of you who ever believed that I was smart. 

 

I clearly do not have my finger on the pulse of the American voter! But I have speculated several times over the past seven or eight years as to how voters were seduced into voting for a philandering, uneducated, dishonest, con man because his affirmation of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia validates the dark shadow, the id, that lies in many of us. 

But earlier this month Jeffery Goldberg published an article in the Atlantic that looked at the cowardice demonstrated by many Republican political leaders, elected officials, many with first rate educations and years of public service experience, who just seemed to have allowed their character, their judgement, and their morals to just collapse at the feet of Donald Trump. 

 

There were 43 Republican senators who had to run for their lives on January 6, 2021. They came back to the desecrated Capitol Building late that night to finish their work of confirming Joe Biden’s election, amid the millions of dollars of damage and feces smeared statues. Many stood up and railed at Donald Trump’s election lies, his refusal to do what every other American president has done, which is to demonstrate the strength of our democracy in a peaceful transfer of power. 

Instead, Trump called upon supporters from across the country to come and help him to “stop the steal” by storming the Capitol, beating down doors and beating armed police who had been ordered not to shoot the rioters. Had this insurrection happened a couple of generations ago, hundreds, if not thousands, of the rioters would have been shot and, I believe, Trump and many members of his family and administration would have been quickly executed after being found guilty of treason. 

 

One protestor was shot before she could break into the room where elected officials were hiding, Eventually, order was restored and many protestors were arrested and tried for their crimes but Republican leaders who so forcefully denounced Trump on the evening of January 6^th, by the time it came to vote on impeachment, a very mild and humane response to a national tragedy that we all watched unfolding before our own eyes on TV and which these senators saw in person from their hiding places, all 43 voted against impeachment in what has to be the most colossal display of cowardice and hypocrisy in American history. 

 

The voting public may have a very short memory but educated and experienced members of the legislature knew that what they experienced was treason, insurrection, an attack on our constitution and the free democracy it creates but out of fear and lust for power, they pretended that what they had seen with their own eyes, what they had heard and experienced, was not as bad as they knew that it was.

 

The rioters erected a hangman’s noose on the Capitol grounds to hang the vice president, Mike Pence, but if these events had taken place just a decade or two ago, surely it would have been Trump and his minions who would have been executed.

There may be some voters who are so deceived by conspiracy theories and the MAGA/Q-anon cult that they can’t see it, but you know that short of a couple of rather challenged Republicans on the hill, you know that they all know that it is true . . . Mitch McConnell, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and most of the others… they know that they have turned their backs on America, on democracy, in order to stay in power. None of them deserve to hold elected office or, in my opinion, a drivers license. 

 

The lust for power has remarkably extended to a kind of misogyny that I cannot even understand. We have debated the issue of abortion for years but sadly, to most people, it seemed like a tempest in a tea pot. No one but radical Catholics and Fundamentalists really wanted to take away the constitutionally protected right of a woman to manage her own reproductive life but that tiny minority was loud and persistent. Republican president after Republican president had promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v Wade but they never meant it and they never did it, but Trump did it and he didn’t really care about the issue. One can only wonder how many abortions he has paid for through the years to avoid paying child support from births from his many affairs. But he appointed judges who were willing to do it.

 

And in a fit of undiluted hypocrisy, the longest sitting justice, Clarence Thomas, not only voted to overturn Roe but in his comments on the decision he said that the court should also take up previous decisions that legalized same sex marriage and even contraception. How is that fact not being discussed in the news every day?

 

Thomas, who was revealed to have tried to start an in office affair with Anita Hill by telling her lurid stories about porn videos he had watched, now wants to legislate Catholic moral standards into law so that all of us who are not Catholic have to abide by the teachings of a Church that he blatantly ignored himself when he was younger. 

 

We have all heard the pushback against the pro-life movement, pointing out that if they were really pro-life that they would favor free child care, universal healthcare, and they would want to outlaw the guns so commonly used to kill children in school. And folks, this is not an argument. For there to be an argument, there has to be two plausible sides to the issue. There is no defense for being anti-abortion while also opposing social support and protection for children after they are born. This is just religious and political hypocrisy . . . there is no argument to be made here. 

I have never said much about Thomas Jefferson’s often repeated quote about how erecting a wall between the church and the state is essential in a free society. In fact, I might have thought this concern was rather dated. Churches can freely advocate for causes, either for women’s rights or in opposition to abortion, in favor of gay rights or in opposition to them, but churches don’t get to legislate.

 

But Clarence Thomas, in a curiously hypocritical religious passion, actually does want to write Catholic values into law. Why would anyone care if gay people are allowed to marry one another? Why would anyone want to prevent a woman from having access to contraception? Why, well, it isn’t a happy story but the “why” is as old as religion’s desire to control women, to control their reproduction, control their sex lives, and to make sure that straight marriage was the only legal option. None of which is any of their business and it should shock, horrify, and motivate all of us to realize that this is, in fact, the most important election of our lifetime and for reasons that make no sense at all, it is an election that very well may go the wrong way! Why would anyone who is not a billionaire vote for Trump’s economic policies? Why would anyone who isn’t a right wing, lunatic, fundamentalist vote for Trump’s misogynistic policies? Why would anyone re-elect any one of the 43 Republican senators who failed to impeach Trump in 2021? Why would anyone who loves democracy vote for anyone who has clearly demonstrated in their holding up aid to Ukraine that they support the re-establishment of the Soviet Union under Putin? 

 

I cannot believe that this is America. And I can tell you, people in Europe can’t believe that this is America. The only two people in Asia and Europe who are happy about Trump’s popularity are China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian president, Vladimir Putin; both of whom are despots who have refused to leave office when their constitutional term in office was over, and both are tyrants that Trump envies because he tried to not leave office and failed and will surely try again if given the chance. Putin wants to take the Ukraine and you know that he will not stop there. Xi Jinping wants to take Taiwan and you know that he will not stop there. 

 

Everything that spiritually conscious people value is in danger as voters in the world’s last great superpower and economic engine go back into the ballot box where a possible majority may embrace disaster. No one should sit this one out. No one should downplay the importance of this November’s election. 

And no one should vote to take away rights from women, minorities, immigrants, or any of the rest of us who are clinging to hope for a sane world.

"Why No One in the Bible Accepted Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior”

Why No One in the Bible Accepted Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior”

April 7, 2024    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

I grew up in rural Kentucky in a household that was on the lower end of the middle class. My parents had grown up in relative poverty on Kentucky farms. My parents raised their four children eating what poor farmers in early 20^th century Kentucky ate, which mostly consisted of foods that could be preserved without refrigeration.

A staple food in my home was fried corn bread. I had to go buy the corn meal and butter milk necessary to make these few pieces. Honestly, I had not made it in years, but my mother made it every day. Coarse stone ground corn meal, with a dash of baking soda, scalded with boiling water and then stirred vigorously while adding butter milk until it made a kind of batter. This kind of corn bread came out looking like a pancake. We had this kind of corn bread at one or two meals a day and there was usually a short stack of cornbread by the stove for anyone who got hungry between meals. You could put butter and sugar on it, crumble it into a glass of buttermilk, or just slather it up with peanut butter, but at most meals, we had it covered in pinto beans.

 

This was filling and, if you are going to go out and chop firewood for the rest of the day, beans and cornbread will keep you going until it kills you with clogged arteries. In most of Central America, beans and rice is the daily meal of the poor. 

 

During my many work trips to Nicaragua, our hotel staff would make eggs and ham for us in the mornings but there was always a large platter of rice and beans because they couldn’t imagine a meal without it. In fact, I would sometimes bring some of our workers from the villages where we were building houses to town with me to treat them to a meal that would be unique to them. If you took them to a pizza place and asked them what they wanted on their pizza, they would give a strange look and reply, “Gallo Pinto,” beans and rice, because they would never have even heard of peperoni or sausage. Their diets consisted of rice and beans and what might be found in the jungle: plantain, bananas, iguana, and what one of my friends called, “a lost chicken.”

 

I lived in Asia last winter, and there, a friend will not ask you if you have had dinner, or if you have eaten, they will ask you, “Did you eat rice today?” Rice is such an assumed stand-alone meal among the poor, that to have eaten rice is what it means to have had food that day. 

 

We tend to normalize our personal experience to the point that at the age of 12, I couldn’t imagine that every house across the country did not have fried corn bread every day. My friends in rural Nicaragua couldn’t imagine that anyone didn’t eat beans and rice every day. When you don’t know anything else, you assume that everyone is more or less like you. My family never ate in restaurants, but I assumed that the people who did were going there to eat cornbread and beans, just like my friends in Asia assume that most meals in most homes around the globe consists of a bowl of rice. 

We form views of what marriage is based on our parents’ marriage. And we assume that even though our friends all went to different churches, we assumed that they all believed basically the same things we did. The Catholics had more statues than we had stained glass windows, but they had the same Bible and we assumed that we were all just trying to get into heaven.

 

As I gradually changed from being a Christian who was trying to get into heaven into a spiritual person who didn’t believe in heaven or hell, I increasingly realized that I didn’t have very many peers in the world. People can understand it if they think you are an atheist, but not many people have a place in their brain for a pastor who doesn’t believe in souls, an afterlife, or a supernatural theistic god who answers prayers. For most people, everyone else in the world either believes the way that they do, or they don’t believe anything at all. 

We tend to globalize our personal experience. “Everyone is more or less like me, or, at least, they should be.” Let me give you an illustration from the recent news about the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore. Sadly, like almost everything else that happens these days, the collapse of the bridge spawned a sudden outbreak of new conspiracy theories about illegal immigrants or terrorism, but most of us accepted that a very big, heavy ship, had a mechanical failure, hit the bridge and brought it down. A tragic event in both loss of life and loss of a major bridge and harbor for several years.

 

The bridge will certainly be rebuilt, though it make take a few years to finish, but have you wondered if the new bridge will also be named for Francis Scott Key? 

Key was a lawyer and poet in Baltimore and he wrote the Star Spangled Banner during the war of 1812, jubilantly celebrating the American victory in a battle he witnessed. But there were critics of hi poem as soon as it was published because Key was a slave owner. Critics said that the United States was more like “the of the free and the home of the oppressed.”

 

Like a lot of people of his day, he was critical of the worst cruelties of slavery but he kept several of his own and he thought of himself as being a good slave owner. He was, in fact, a very ardent member of the Episcopal Church. He adamantly opposed the abolition of slavery and in fact, the third verse of the Star Spangled Banner, a verse you never heard sung at baseball games, says:

 

No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

 

This verse was a special derision of slaves and indentured servants who were fighting for the British so that they could be freed. Key assures them, in this verse, that they will find their graves before they find freedom. The Star Spangled Banner became our national anthem in the 1930’s in some of the worst of our history of Jim Crow laws, segregation, lynching, and racism. So, his connection to slavery and his opposition to abolition wasn’t much of a problem for white folks in the 1930’s and not enough of an issue to be seriously considered in the 1970’s when the bridge was built, but what about now?

 

Now Maryland has a black governor. Baltimore has a black mayor. Blacks outnumber whites, 2 to 1 in Baltimore. Shouldn’t we come up with a better name for a bridge in that harbor?

You know, Fredrick Douglas was a contemporary of Key’s, and he is from Baltimore. 

So was Billie Holliday, and Justice Thurgood Marshall, for goodness sakes, Ta-Nehisi Coates is from Baltimore! 

But see, even knowing that Francis Scott Key was a slave owner who fought against abolition, and advocated for freed slaves to be immediately shipped out of the United States and sent back to Africa, even if you didn’t know it before just this moment, do you, if you are white, still struggle with not naming the new bridge after Francis Scott Key? And while I am at it, why couldn’t “This Land is Your Land” become our national anthem. Just because white people were insensitive jerks in the 1930’s doesn’t mean that we have to be in 2024, or does it? Are we able to change our views in light of new information? 

 

It makes us uncomfortable to learn that Christopher Columbus funded his new world exploration by capturing Indians and taking them back to Europe as slaves. And illustrations like this one don’t even touch the fact that many were young women and boys who were taken to be sex slaves which is why many of you proudly announce that your “23 and me” results show that you are 2% native American… it isn’t a good story and some of your ancestors were horrible people. When we didn’t know the truth about Columbus, we could feel one way about his holiday, and now that we know, not many of us are willing to honor such a person. 

 

It is different when you didn’t know, it is something else when you know, and you don’t care. The famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, defines “evil” as being “militant ignorance.” And this is especially true in my field, which, if you have forgotten, is religion.

 

It is one thing to globalize your belief that everyone else eats what you eat, or to believe that Francis Scott Key was a noble patriot who wrote the song we sing at baseball games, though I hope that you can move past that; but when it comes to religion, most of us were raised to reject any new or different ideas. We were taught that it is a virtue to believe, by blind faith, things that just are not true.

 

Look, I live alone, as I have for many years, and so, social media becomes the place where I go for conversation about things that I am excited about, or what I am mad about, or what fills me with wonder. A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of some personal disappointment with public religion, I wrote this post: 

Two times in the past week, very educated, professional, people here in Florida have summed up the goal of religion as being coming to "know Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior." They say this in order to dismiss any religious differences, at least among Christian denominations and sects. 

I pointed out to both of them that the word "personal" does not appear anywhere in the Bible, not in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament and the concept of "accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior" was a creation of late 19th century revivalism in the 2nd Great Awakening based on a poor reading of John Calvin. They both just blinked and pretended that I had not said anything.

 

I pressed the point, saying, "No one in the Bible was described as having accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior." Again, these two very self-confident "scientists" made it clear that they still believed that the essence of the faith journey is just what they had heard in these echoes of 19th century revival preachers. 

 

In both instances, I tried to stress that the message of Jesus was about a kind of radical compassion and that to be "followers of the Way," as early Christians seem to have referenced themselves, was to embody that message of radical compassion (See Matthew 25:31-46). Again, this statement of the obvious had no effect. 

When it comes to religion, people's critical thinking skills often just go on vacation. They will believe something that is clearly not true because, as existentialists sometimes say, "it pleases me to do so," but in a matter as important as one's faith, why would anyone reject reason and especially reject contrary evidence????

 

This was just a Friday night rant for me but it turned out to be new information for a whole lot of people who had no idea that the word “personal” is not in the Bible and that no one in the Bible got saved by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. But what really toasts my noodle is when people are made aware of this bit of theological insight, they insist upon holding onto a form of Christianity that was invented by nearly illiterate revivalist preachers in the American west in the late 1800’s. Why call it Christianity if you know that it is a formulaic religion that Jesus, Peter, Paul, James, and John wouldn’t recognize and surely wouldn’t approve of? 

 

It has been a long time since I have claimed to specifically be a Christian, but if I did, I think that I would want the real thing and not some snake oil salesman version of a once laudable faith! 

 

I thought my career had long ago moved away from the Biblical word studies that I talked about in the 1980’s, but if you’ll allow me one further point: the word “salvation” in the Bible never meant your one-way ticket on the soul train to heaven. The word is σωτηρία (sotiria), which means, “to be made whole.” 

Even scholarly translations of the New Testament often get this wrong. In Mark, chapter 10, when Jesus heals blind Bartimaeus, the text reads, “Go, your faith as made you well.” But in Greek, it isn’t “made you well,” it is “sotiria.” But in the passage about the sinful woman in the house of the pharisee in Luke, chapter 7, when he forgives her of her sins, he is quoted as saying, “Go, your faith has saved you,” but the word in Greek is the same. It is the prejudice of the translators who think that illicit sex is a sin that needs to be forgiven and blindness is a medical condition that needs to be fixed. In the language of the New Testament, they are the same. Salvation has to do with healing your brokenness, it has nothing to do with going to heaven. I could get excited about talking about salvation if people knew what the world meant. 

Americans have turned Christianity and Judaism and I suspect that the same has infected Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, with a notion of personal life enhancement and after-life fire insurance. Forgive me for being so blunt, but that is embarrassingly stupid. We Unitarians are fond of saying that “love is our religion” but that is not a baptized form of narcissism. The point is that we love other people. Remember the song, “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight”? Honestly, didn’t you catch the meaning of this in kindergarten? 

 We’ve covered a lot of ground today: Everyone doesn’t eat friend cornbread or rice every day. Neither Francis Scott Key nor Christopher Columbus were noble historical figures. And Jesus never asked anyone to accept him as their personal lord and savior. He did, evidently, ask you to love your enemies and forgive those who have wronged you. His message was self-evidently a message about showing radical compassion in how you live your life which should be obvious from everything he is reported to have said! 

And not that you asked, but if there was a hell, for me that would be having to spend eternity with the people who think they deserve to be in heaven. 

 

But maybe that’s just me.